Short Fiction - Algis Budrys (chrysanthemum read aloud .TXT) 📗

moats in Erie, Pennsylvania, vassals in New Brunswick, and a great stinking warren of low, half-timbered houses on the island of Manhattan. If it had taken a few centuries longer to recover from the cauterizing sun bombs, these things might still have been. But they might have had different names, and human history might have been considered to begin only a few hundred years before. Even this had not happened. The link with the past remained. There was a narrow, cobbled path on Manhattan, with sewage oozing down the ditch in its center, which was still Fifth Avenue. It ran roughly along the same directions as old Broadway, not because there was no one who could read the yellowed old maps but because surveying was in its second childhood. There was a barge running between two ropes stretched across the Hudson, and this was the George Washington Bridge ferry. So, it was only a kink in history, not a break.

But Rome was not rebuilt in a day. Hodd Savage⁠—the Barbarian, the man who had come out of the hinterlands to batter on civilization’s badly mortared walls⁠—clamped his hand on Giulion Geoffrey’s arm, grunted, jerked his head toward the cluster of nobles standing beside the campfire, and muttered: “Listen.”

Geoffrey listened.

The nobles were between him and the fire, and almost none of them were more than silhouettes. Here and there, a man faced toward the fire at such an angle that Geoffrey could make out the thick arch of an eyebrow, the jut of a cheek, or the crook of a nose. But it was not enough for recognition. All the nobles were dressed in battle accoutrements that had become stained or torn. Their harness had shifted, their tunics were askew, and they were bunched so closely that the outline of one man blended into the mis-shaped shadow of the next. The voices were hoarse from an afternoon’s bellowing. Some were still drunk with the acid fire of exhausted nerves, and were loud. Others, drained, mumbled in the background like a chorus of the stupid. Gesticulating, mumbling, shouting, shadowed, lumped into one knot of blackness lighted by a ruddy cheekbone here, a gleaming brow there above an eye socket as inky and blank as a bottomless pit, they were like something out of the wan and misty ages before the Earth had had time to form completely.

Two arguing voices rose out of the mass:

“Those three barbarian tankettes are mine, I say!”

“Yours when I lie dead!”

“They surrendered to me!”

“Because I pounded them into submission.”

“Into submission, indeed! You skulked around their flanks like a lame dog, and now that I’ve taken them, you want your bone!”

“You were glad enough to see me there when the battle was hot. Call me a dog again and I’ll spit you like a rat on a pitchfork.”

No one else in the group of nobles paid the two of them any attention. No one had time to spare for any quarrel but his own, and the whole squabbling pile of them looked ready to fly apart at any moment⁠—to draw sidearms and knives and flare into spiteful combat.

The Barbarian spat quietly. “There’s your Seaboard League, lad. There’s your convocation of free men. Step out there and ask for your lands back. Care to try?”

“We’ve already decided that wouldn’t be wise,” Geoffrey said irritably. He had never cared much for these inevitable aftermaths to battle, but it made him angry to have an inland barbarian make pointed comments. “I suppose it’s different when you win, eh?”

“Not very. But then, we’re not civilized. Let’s get moving, lad.”

Silently, they skirted the fire and made their way toward the parked vehicles of the Barbarian’s captured supply train. The ground was rough and covered by underbrush. More than once, the Barbarian stumbled into Geoffrey, making him clench his jaw against the pain in his chest. But he saw no point in saying anything about it.

“There she is,” the Barbarian said in a husky growl. Geoffrey peered through the brush at an armored trailer whose flat sides were completely undecorated except for a scarlet bearpaw painted on the door. A lantern gleamed behind the slit windows, and the Barbarian grunted with satisfaction. “She’s still in there. Fine. We’ll have this done in a couple of seconds.”

In spite of the incongruity, Geoffrey asked curiously: “What’s a second?”

“A division of time, lad⁠—one sixtieth of a minute.”

“Oh. What on Earth would you want to measure that accurately for?”

“For getting women out of trailers in a hurry, lad. Now⁠—let’s look for sentries.”

There were two guarding the trailer⁠—men-at-arms from Dugald’s holding, Geoffrey noticed⁠—carrying shotguns and lounging in the shadows. One of them had a wineskin⁠—Geoffrey heard the gurgle plainly⁠—and the other was constantly turning away from the trailer to listen to the shrieks and shouting coming from among the other vehicles of the train, where other guards were not being quite as careful of their masters’ new property.

“I see they’ve found the quartermaster’s wagons,” the Barbarian said drily. “Now, then, lad⁠—you work away toward the right, there, and I’ll take the left. Here⁠—take my knife. I won’t need it.” The Barbarian passed over a length of steel as big as a short-sword, but oddly curved and sharpened down one side of the blade. “Stab if you can, but if you have to cut, that blade’ll go through a man’s forearm. Remember you’re not holding one of those overgrown daggers of yours.”

“And just why should I kill a man for you?”

“Do you think that man won’t try to kill you?”

Geoffrey had no satisfactory answer to that. He moved abruptly off into the brush, holding the Barbarian’s knife, and wondering just how far he was obligated for a bandaged chest and half a pint of water. But a man’s duty to his rescuer was plain enough, and, besides, just what else was there to do?

The blame for it all went squarely back to Dugald, and Geoffrey did not love him for it. He slipped through the bushes until he was only a